MediaFile

What is it with the renewed interest in 3-D?  Not to be outdone by the movies like Avatar and a sudden burst of sporting events to be broadcast with players looming in the foreground, newspapers want to jump in on the trend.

The Philadelphia Inquirer, fresh out of bankruptcy aution with new owners, is rolling out a special 3-D newspaper section on Sunday June 13. The Web site philly.com gets the treatment on June 14.  The paper will helpfully provide 3-D viewing glasses inserted in the Sunday edition so readers can get the full visual effect of “local interest” photos and a front page folded ad — known as a spadea in newspaper lingo — from Best Buy.

Just in case you don’t want to read the paper or Web site in 3-D, the paper helpfully points out that  the 3-D images will appear normal without the glasses so as to prevent a wave of subscribers from phoning in with complaints about blurry images.

This all comes out of something called the Media Lab, a advertising creative service launched by Philly newspapers in 2006.

Rumors of a Yahoo management reshuffling, two newspaper publisher bankruptcies and a bit of PR unsavvy on Microsoft’s part do not make for a quiet weekend. Although not exactly high-octane breaking news, the stuff kept happening in dribs and drabs throughout the weekend, leading me to update my Facebook status thus: “Anupreeta would have liked at least 30 percent more weekend.” But so it goes.

On Friday night, All Things Digital’s Kara Swisher reported that a major Yahoo management reorganization was underway, and could come as early as this week. The Wall Street Journal, which shares an owner — News Corp’s Dow Jones — with All Things D, followed with its own story a day later.

Then, Microsoft — a big employer of foreign workers which took some heat last month from politicians for announcing plans to lay off 5,000 people — dug its heels deeper into the mess. It seems the software giant overpaid some laid-off workers because of an accounting error, and now wants the money back. Yikes. Does Microsoft need to do more damage control than this?

The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News are two papers that have suffered persistent misery in recent years as former owner Knight Ridder couldn’t stop their ad revenue and circulation declines. Things haven’t gotten much better… until the Phillies won Major League Baseball’s World Series Wednesday night — the first time that has happened in 28 years.

Now? They can’t print enough. Here’s the press release:

PHILADELPHIA, October 30, 2008 – In response to the Phillies World Series win last night, Philadelphia Media Holdings Chief Executive Officer Brian Tierney announced this morning that last night’s over-run of almost 350,000 copies of The Inquirer and Daily News are completely sold out. And, in an unprecedented move, the printing presses are running again this morning so that an additional 350,000 copies can be printed and available by early afternoon today.

“People are buying these souvenir editions of The Inquirer and Daily News in massive quantities and we are responding by firing up our printing presses for another run this morning,” said Mr. Tierney. “We have not restarted the presses like this in decades but we want to be sure that every fan who wants a copy of our newspapers can buy one.”